


Suffrage

by Typey



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-02
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-26 11:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Typey/pseuds/Typey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Race got an anon prompt about Helena and voting, so I filled it with this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suffrage

Myka had never seen that particular look on Helena’s face. Anger, pain, fear, grief, determination, caution, contentment, amusement, relief, love, ecstasy — of course. But awe? No.

Helena was not there as a participant, obviously, but there was no way Myka was going to have made the drive from the Warehouse to the nearest elementary school that first Tuesday in November and not brought her wife.

Myka had her sample ballot, notated with her own and Helena’s marks, questions and (occasionally vicious) commentary on various candidates. Helena stood next to her in line, silent as she had been for the entire ride through the mostly barren landscape, silent in a way Myka had never seen her. Helena wasn’t speaking, but she was vibrating with expectancy, and Myka could tell her mind was spinning. No, not spinning. Helena was fully engaged with her surroundings, she was simply processing all of it at speed and with intensity.

Her eyes flicked from person to person — in the line and loitering by the door and leaving the polling area — lingering longest on each of the women she saw. Women who wouldn’t have been able to vote in Helena’s previous life. Women whose rights Helena had promoted through the only mouthpiece she had available to her as a Victorian lady — her brother’s.

Not only was Helena surrounded by the result of one of her most dearly held social pursuits, she was watching an expansion of societal boundaries she never could have imagined. Married women voting without their husbands; single women voting because they recognized their stake in the outcome; young women (some of them still in high school, Myka knew) with idealism gleaming in their eyes — all of that would have been astonishing to Helena. But there were women on the ballot, and many of them were expected to win — although Helena had strong opinions about some of the female candidates who seemed to spew dangerous misinformation and back dastardly policies to the detriment of women and children — to beat out male candidates, to succeed with votes from men.

Women voting, and men voting for women.

Voting for anyone was one thing Helena had never done.

Invention — of gadgets, puzzles, words — was one thing; autonomy another. Making your voice heard in its own name, a right Myka realized she had taken for granted since even before she’d turned 18, was something the most brilliant woman she’d ever known had never been able to fulfill for herself. 

Myka wished she could give this feeling to Helena, let her walk up to a poll worker with a name and address on a voter roll, to take the paper ballot that South Dakota still used, and punch her choices with all the force of a century’s anticipation.

Her choice, her voice. Acting, speaking for herself in her own name.

They neared the front of the line, almost to the point where they would have to part for the moments it would take Myka to transfer her selections from the booklet to the ballot.

“Thank you.”

The words Myka had expected to speak instead came from Helena, eyes deep with love and gratitude.

Myka stuttered her reply. “I owe you the thanks. You fought for this. You saw the need and the opportunity and you fought.”

She couldn’t understand why she was having to explain to Helena that the rights that Myka had always held were because of the work by women like Helena. Women who had chipped away at, and then demolished, barriers. Without Helena — and, oh, it went so far beyond voting — Myka wouldn’t be here. The weight of the moment threatened to topple Myka’s well-tended inner balance.

A light touch from her wife focused her attention back on the moment.

Helena smiled, and then leaned in for the briefest of kisses. “I would thank every single woman in this building for showing me a reality I had only ever dreamt of,” an impish grin and a raised eyebrow made Myka smile, as they always did, “but I think I’d get ejected for causing a disturbance.”

Myka took one last step forward to the line of yellow tape on the floor, waiting to hear, “next!” Helena reached out a hand to Myka’s abdomen, tenderly stroking the now-noticeable protrusion where their daughter-to-be nestled. “I never voted, you always have, and she always will. It’s about the future, darling.”


End file.
